It is unfortunate that the ADA is designed so that the only mechanism of enforcement of disability rights is lawsuits. :-\
Maybe there should be some exceptions around things provided on a "best-effort" basis, if they can be very carefully crafted.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
Entirely irrelevant.
If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?
By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.
This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Bullshit.
Tell us - how much money did they make?
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
As I said - if this is such an obvious wrong, fix the damn law. As it is written, Berkeley didn't have a leg to stand on.
